232 DARWIN. 



been slight, and when we read what he saw 

 during these three years, between the age of 

 twenty-two and twenty-five, we realize the great- 

 ness of his genius. The procession of life in time 

 had already come passingly before him. He now 

 learnt for himself, first, the great lesson of uni- 

 formity of past and present causes, that for Nature 

 ' time is nothing.' The rocks, the fossils, the life 

 of the continents and islands passed before his 

 mind like a panorama of that grand history which 

 had come singly and in fragments to every evo- 

 lutionist preceding him. Only a few decades back, 

 Humboldt had taken a somewhat similar journey 

 in South America, and had written: "This phe- 

 nomenon" (the distribution of plants) "is one of 

 the most curious in the history of organic forms. 

 I say history, for in vain would reason forbid man 

 to form hypotheses upon the origin of things ; he 

 still goes on puzzling himself with insoluble prob- 

 lems relating to the distribution of beings." The 

 same phenomena came to Darwin's mind as the 

 greatest and most pressing for solution, and he 

 returned from this voyage determined to solve 

 the problem of the origin of species by induction. 

 There were but two theories to choose from, the 

 Special Creation theory, and the Transmutation 

 theory. He took them up with an open mind. 



Now let us see how the full-grown Evolution idea 

 had come to him. At the age of eighteen, while 

 in the University of Edinburgh, Darwin formed the 



